What do Democrats Want ?

July 25th, 2020

I have been watching the gradual, then sudden, dissolution of a political party. My parents were Democrats. They were shocked when they learned I had voted for Richard Nixon in 1960. Jimmy Carter was a failure as a President but I wasn’t really worried about the country when he was in office. His actions with Iran and the Panama Canal were harmful but they were a matter of policy. Ronald Reagan, not a governor I was fond of in California, was a successful president. He was able to work with the Democrat Party in spite of some far left loonies like Chris Dodd. Many of the far left members of the Democrat Party favored communists like the Sandinistas but they were kept in line by the old pols to whom graft and spending were more important. Tip O’Neill would let Reagan win the Cold War as long as Reagan let the Democrat Congress run up the deficit.

Bill Clinton changed much of this dynamic in two ways. First, he was a lot more ideological than previous presidents and second he was incompetent at it. Clinton is a very smart man but his wife, Hillary, was far too obvious in her corruption. First the 900 FBI files, then the White House Travel Office. Both were scandals that primed him for a big loss.

Then the 1994 elections turned the Congress over to the Republicans and we learned how little they were interested in Conservatism. They accomplished nothing before being ousted by Democrats in 2006. This, of course, was followed by the housing and mortgage collapse of 2008. There was some attempt by Bush administration officials to rein in Congress and the debt explosion but it was probably too late anyway. The 2008 election placed Congress in Democrats’ hands for the first time with a Democrat president since 1974. Clinton’s two years did not result in much happening. Then first Obama Congress spent like drunken sailors but were quickly reined in in 2010.

What might happen if Biden won the presidency and the Democrats got a majority in the Congress ?

In the past until now, there was zero chance that the hard Left would ever win an American election. No socialist has ever come close. Even Bernie Sanders accepted that the Democratic establishment for six years broke rules, leveraged candidates to drop out, and warped the media to ensure that he would remain a septuagenarian blowhard railing at the wind from one of his three houses. George McGovern was buried by a landslide. Most Democrats, after Kennedy and until Obama, never won the popular vote unless possessed of a Southern-accented hinting at centrism.

Only the Great Depression and World War II ensured four terms of FDR, who still knew enough not to let his house socialists ruin the wartime U.S. economy.

But in perfect storm and black swan fashion, the coronavirus, the lockdown, the riots, anarchy and looting, all combined with Trump Derangement Syndrome to be weaponized by the Left—and the media far more successfully than with their failed pro forma, legalistic efforts with Robert Mueller and impeachment to destroy the Trump presidency—have pushed socialism along.

I thought Obama was an empty suit. Biden is an empty head.

Who is behind all this and why ?

Why would any socialist go after the sympathetic mega-funders of the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Google or Apple News, Twitter, or Vox?

Left-wing billionaires are not so strange as we might think. After all, they can afford to be socialists. They like the idea that fewer may follow in their footsteps. They think social activism offers them penance for their hard-driving acquisitiveness. Most of all, they feel their knack for making money is proof that they have the wisdom, the right, and the need to redirect the lives of less successful others—and for the good of all.

Otherwise, the plutocratic class will spend hundreds of millions—a proverbial drop in the bucket in their fortunes—to consult with lawmakers about how to avoid their own progressive legislation and policies. It will hire phalanxes of tax lawyers, trust evaders, and philanthropy scammers that will make the architects of the Clinton Foundation seem a poor joke.

The real enemy in 2021 would be the upper-middle-class as it always is, the kulaks—and not really the professionals such as the lawyers, media grandees, and professors—although many should expect to become collateral damage.

I tend to agree with this analysis. There is a small club of super rich right now who seem determined to rule the rest of us. Why ? I think it is the arrogance of those who think they are much smarter than the vast majority. Some of this is true but there is also a tendency for those well informed in one field to assume they are equally well informed in others. They may also assume that knowledge in one area is more important than another. A nuclear physicist may not know how to change a tire or to install a new garbage disposal. We used to laugh at absent minded professors but those absent minded individuals may have the power of life and death over others who will be afraid to laugh.

Democrats who might have been wary of the promises of Socialists and impractical dreamers before seem to think that a faceless, nameless bureaucracy will run things efficiently in spite of extreme policies offered as the rationale for governing.

I would not be so sure of that.

The principal–agent problem, in political science and economics, (also known as agency dilemma or the agency problem) occurs when one person or entity (the “agent”) is able to make decisions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the “principal”.[1] This dilemma exists in circumstances where agents are motivated to act in their own best interests, which are contrary to those of their principals, and is an example of moral hazard.

The Founders were well aware of this problem and tried to protect the citizens with certain provisions of the Constitution.

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

Protest or Insurrection ?

June 8th, 2020

The protests that quickly morphed into rioting and mass looting began with an arrest of a career felon for trying to pass a counterfeit bill. He had been convicted of felony home invasion and robbery in Texas and served 5 years in prison. According to several unreliable sites, he was”turning his life around” and was involved with a church. That argument is somewhat diminished by the fact that he had Methamphetamine and Fentanyl in toxic levels at autopsy. The reaction in Minneapolis was extreme and horrific.

Some of the destruction can be seen here the next day.

It got worse, much worse.

The spineless leftist Mayor is now seeking $55 million form somebody to repair damage he might have prevented.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will seek state and federal aid to rebuild city structures following over a week of looting and rioting, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Friday.

Some 220 buildings have been damaged and require at least $55 million in repairs, the city’s Community Planning & Economic Development department said earlier this week, noting that the city was “not yet ready to produce a credible estimate.” City Council members warned that the costs will likely be far higher, while Mayor Frey said damages could reach into the “hundreds of millions.”

Typically, he tried to seek approval from black rioters and was expelled from the meeting.

He was elected on a platform of fighting “global warming.”

A pretty good explanation of what is behind all this.

For white liberals, a black identity shaped by rage is not only to be condoned, but celebrated. All politics is identity politics to liberals, because the whole object of their existence is to invent one’s identity according to therapeutic needs. That is why the progressive movement took up the cause of transgender rights with such passion: To change one’s gender is the ultimate expression of self-invention in defiance of nature and tradition.

The possessors of these newly-invented pseudo-selves know that they are imposters, and that everyone is laughing at them behind their backs. As Mephisto told Faust, “Wear a wig with a million hairs, and stand in heels as long as your elbow, and you still remain what you are.”

The motivation behind these riots is becoming clear. Antifa is an international, communist based, terror organization.

Antifa is not a single organization: it is a movement or coalition of leftist groups, each of which claims to combat “fascism,” a political ideology whose definition academics have been arguing about for decades. The word Antifa itself is a truncation of anti-fascist.

Despite the name, the movement embraces fascistic tactics.

Antifa has gained new prominence in the post-Obama era. They trace their roots back to Nazi Germany. Although they opposed the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Nazi storm troopers, like the SA they also used violence to intimidate political opponents and break up their meetings and rallies. It could be argued that the ideological distance between Antifa and the now-defunct National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated as NSDAP) or Nazi Party, is so slight it can be measured in millimeters.

How is it funded ?

[T]he left-wing billionaire George Soros has ties to Antifa through a group called the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ). Soros’s philanthropy, known at the time as the Open Society Institute, gave $100,000 to AfGJ ($50,000 in 2004 and $50,000 in 2006).

Acting as a fiscal sponsor, AfGJ gave $50,000 to Refuse Fascism, an unincorporated Antifa group. Fiscal sponsors are recognized tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofits that take in donations on behalf of unincorporated or small groups so that donors can deduct the donations from their taxes, charging the group receiving the donation a processing fee.

Refuse Fascism was created in the weeks after Donald Trump’s unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. The group’s goal was summed up in a slogan on its website: “It’s Fascism: Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!”

Some of the members are employed, usually by universities or school boards. The man arrested for striking a demonstrator with a bike lock was shown to be a non-teaching employee of UC Berkeley. However, his charge for felony assault, resulted in 3 year probation. Thus local juries and judges tend to favor the offenders.

Eric Clanton had been linked by police to violent assaults with a metal bike lock during a “free speech” rally in Berkeley on April 15, 2017. Before his arrest, Clanton had been “outed” online, on the website 4chan, as someone who used a bike lock to strike a man in the head. The assault was captured in a video clip (below) that drew widespread attention and anger after it was posted on YouTube.

Wednesday, Clanton was supposed to have had his preliminary hearing, where a judge decides whether there’s enough evidence in a case for it to move ahead to trial. Instead, there was no hearing, and information about Clanton’s plea deal became available online.

According to Alameda County Superior Court records, Clanton entered a “no contest” plea Wednesday to one misdemeanor battery charge. The felony charges against him were dismissed, and an allegation that he had caused serious bodily injury was stricken. A misdemeanor charge that Clanton wore a mask during the commission of the crime also was dropped.

The local leader of a group called “By Any Means Necessary,” an affiliate of Antifa, was similarly, given a token sentence.

Under a plea agreement, the Sacramento District Attorney is set to dismiss a case against Berkeley teacher Yvette Felarca and two co-defendants related to a neo-Nazi rally and counter-protest more than three years ago.

Felarca and two other activists were scheduled to go to trial Thursday over felony assault charges and misdemeanor rioting charges, but left the morning court hearing, in front of Judge Richard Sueyoshi, with only a community service requirement and stay-away order.

“This is a victory,” said Felarca, a King Middle School teacher and controversial activist with By Any Means Necessary, in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Of course I’m relieved, it’s just been a long process and a struggle. I’m really so happy for all three of us. To me it’s a real affirmation of standing by your convictions.”

Needless to say, the “White Supremacist” rally was a fiction. Does anyone think they will “stay away?”

Relatives of Democrat politicians are also members of this group

The son of VP candidate Tim Kaine was arrested at an Antifa riot. The son of Minnesota AG Keith Ellison (former black Muslim ) has announced he is an Antifa supporter and made the motion to disband the Minneapolis police.

More evidence of the insanity of academia, which has spread to the population.

An example of focusing on “underrepresented minorities” can be seen in the recently established “Power Hour” at Gordon Research Conferences. While this effort is commendable in order to increase the participation of women in science it diminishes the contributions by men (or any other group). Universities have established various centers for “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion”, complete with mandatory seminars and training. These issues have influenced hiring practices to the point where the candidate’s inclusion in one of the preferred social groups may override his or her qualifications.

The paper has now been withdrawn.

The rioting is part of a plan.

May 31st, 2020

Patriot_Prayer_vs_Antifa_protests._Photo_11_of_14_(25095096398)

The present rioting, which is occurring in cities that have leftist Mayors and administrations, is part of a plan. We have seen this slowly coming together. The “Black Lives Matter” theme goes back for years. It is increasingly radicalized. The election of Donald Trump made everything about politics.

An article in Bazaar from a few days ago: If you are married to a Trump Supporter, Divorce Them:

Supporting Trump at this point does not indicate a difference of opinions. It indicates a difference of values…You do not need to try to make it work with someone who thinks of people as “illegals.” Just divorce them

This would be amusing if it were not behind the latest attack on civilization. Are we becoming the Weimar Republic ?

In 2002, a pro-Israel event at San Francisco State University was interrupted by ‘protestors’, screaming things like “go back to Russia!” and “get out or we will kill you!’ and shoving Hillel students against a wall. Laurie Zoloth, a campus Jewis leader “turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, ‘it would start a riot.’ I told them that it already was a riot.”

That, of course, was San Francisco, ground zero in the war on civilization, which is being directed from walled compounds in rich areas.

The insurrection, which is going on now, is an attempt to create another Kent State event, which would radicalize more young people as that event did. The Governor of Minnesota, who daughter seems to be a participant in the riot direction is desperate to find a “white supremacist” to blame.

So far, he has been blaming “outsiders,” a claim that has been proven false. Few of those arrested gave other than Minnesota addresses.

KARE11 reviewed 36 arrests on the Hennepin County Jail roster and found that 86% of the arrests they reviewed had a Minnesota address.

Following the revelation, Mayor Carter and Mayor Frey said that the information about rioters being from out of the area was inaccurate, according to KARE11.

Mayor Carter blamed the police for providing bad information.

Minneapolis Police spokesman John Elder said that he believes many of those arrested gave false addresses.

Oh, OK.

More on the plan.

The first thing to understand about the destructive mob riots sweeping the country is that they are not race riots. The death of George Lloyd in Minneapolis last week while being arrested by the police is merely the pretext for the violence. The cause is hatred. Hatred of America, first of all, but ultimately hatred of civilized order itself.

Many of the thugs looting and destroying property are white. So what we are witnessing is not a battle between black and white. It is a battle between the forces of civilization, on the one hand, and the forces of anarchy, on the other.

But no—that is not quite right. To speak of a battle between two things implies that there are two active sides. That is not, not yet, the case with the tsunami of destruction and murder we are watching on nightly television. Rather, what we are witnessing is an assault by the forces of barbarism on a supine establishment that has been pretending to represent the authority of civilization.

This is insurrection. Plan and simple.

The mayor of Minneapolis blamed “white supremacists” and “outsiders” for the violence.

Unfortunately for that assertion, there are no white supremacists to be found, only members of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and kindred groups. An analysis of the zip codes of those arrested shows that they are overwhelmingly from the Minneapolis area.

There are no “White Supremacists,” just white anarchists and their black allies and stooges.

Even the story is now complciated by the coroner’s report.

The official complaint submitted to a Minnesota district court answers some questions, but raises others.
Things are often more complicated than they appear at first blush. That is certainly the case with the murder of George Floyd, with which former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged in a complaint filed on Friday.

For one thing, contrary to most people’s assumption, Mr. Floyd appears not to have died from asphyxia or strangulation as Chauvin pinned him to the ground, knee to the neck. Rather, as alleged in the complaint, Floyd suffered from coronary-artery disease and hypertensive-heart disease. The complaint further intimates, but does not come out and allege, that Floyd may have had “intoxicants” in his system. The effects of these underlying health conditions and “any potential intoxicants” are said to have “combined” with the physical restraint by three police officers, most prominently Chauvin, to cause Floyd’s death.

As I’ve noted in a column on the homepage, Hennepin County prosecutors have charged Chauvin with third-degree depraved-indifference homicide. Now that the complaint has been released publicly, we see that a lesser offense was also charged: second-degree manslaughter. This homicide charge involves “culpable negligence creating an unreasonable risk” of serious bodily harm, and carries a maximum sentence of ten years’ imprisonment.

This is not murder, based on the facts. The appearances were bad but maybe not so bad after all videos are seen.

Will the anarchist left be satisfied with less than a lynching of the cop ? I don’t think do. They want another Kent State but Trump is more media savvy than Nixon was under similar pressure.

The grand daughter we haven’t seen since Christmas.

May 27th, 2020

This is really getting annoying.

Lily513

Maybe we will get to CA by the end of June. Arizona is pretty op[en as it has a Republican Governor.

California is being held hostage by you-know-who.

George Harrington MD

May 16th, 2020

I was thinking about Psychiatry today and the problems of deinstitutionalization. The best source for the latter is “My brother Ron,” by Clayton Cramer.

My book review of this book is here.

I was a medical student in 1962 when I got a summer job working in a VA psychiatric hospital doing routine physicals on the inmates. They were all men and some had been there for years. They were all “chronic hospital cases,” as described in this excellent history. Mr. Cramer gives a very thorough history of psychiatry leading up to the introduction of psychiatric drugs that actually worked and the social upheavals of the 60s that led to the emptying of the state mental hospitals. At the time I had my personal experience with the chronic schizophrenic, the deinstitutionalization movement was just getting started. My own days with these patients were similar in many respects to Mr Cramer’s experiences with his brother, Ron. Fortunately, none were my relatives and I could go home every night and leave their troubles behind. Still, the experience of talking to them all day was exhausting. My job was to do annual physicals since the psychiatry residents did not want to do so.

This was the height of the psychoanalysis influence on psychiatry. Fortunately, the chief of the service where I was working was a former analyst who realized that Freud had nothing to offer the psychotic patient. He taught me to talk to the sane part of the patient and ignore the “crazy” part. The early drugs, like chlorpromazine (Thorazine), allowed much better interaction with these chronic schizophrenics. Some of them explained what it was like to be “crazy,” their preferred term. I witnessed Electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) and saw the “lucid interval” that often followed the session. The patients usually lapsed into psychosis again after a few hours but the desire was to try to prolong the effect and this led to repeat sessions.

The author does a great job with the history and goes into far more detail on the legal aspects than I did in the chapter on psychiatry in my own book, A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine. He writes about “The fever treatment” that won a Nobel Prize for Wagner-Jauregg, the advocate, in the 1920s. This was a result of success with syphilis using fever when the drugs were inadequate and toxic. The legal history is important as the legal maneuvers of anti-psychiatry forces were the proximate cause of the disaster that followed. The homeless problem appeared in the 70s as the mental hospitals emptied and the former patients found nothing to replace them. The Community Mental Health Centers, as the author so well describes, were intended to take the place of the state hospitals but were never adequate, especially in the era of “talk therapy,” where a single psychiatrist could only see eight to ten patients a day.

I teach medical students and take them to the homeless shelters in Los Angeles every year so they can see where their County Hospital patients come from, and return to after hospitalization. They are able to see the futility of prescribing medicines when the patient has no clock or refrigerator to time the dose or preserve the drug between doses. The author relates the incidence of mental illness among the street population. The managers of the shelters tell me and my students that 60% of the homeless are psychotic and 60% are drug and alcohol addicts. Half of each group is both. For the first few years, we had an amazing guide, a former homeless man now working for the city. He would regale us with stories of his ten years on the street addicted to crack cocaine. He took us to shelters and to homeless hideouts where he warned us not to go there without him.

This book is a source for anyone who wants to know how things got so bad and why the families of psychotic patients are so frustrated with the “advocates” who block treatment or commitment of those unable to care for themselves. One of my students’ patients was a man with a severe leg infection that threatened amputation. He lived on the sidewalk in front of a Pasadena church. He refused parishioners’ offers of housing, telling them he was waiting for the perfect apartment. He barely kept his leg with intense treatment. After treatment, he returned to the street. This is a national tragedy and the reasons are well explained in this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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My experience described above was with George Harrington MD, the most impressive man I have ever met in Medicine. His obituary:
Born in Independence, Missouri, Dr. Harrington attended the University of Kansas, where he received his medical degree in 1941. He also played football for the university. He then interned in Chicago, and during World War II served in the Pacific theater as a Navy flight surgeon. He was the recipient of a Personal Citation, Distinguished Flying Cross, and four Air Medals as a result of his service. In 1946, Dr. Harrington began his residency training in psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation of Psychiatry, and became a faculty member at the Menninger School of Psychiatry. He also served as chief of professional services at the Winter VA Hospital in Topeka, Kansas and was a member of the American Psychiatric Association. In 1955, he moved with his family to Pacific Palisades, where he began private practice. He was also a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and head of psychiatric services at Brentwood VA Hospital until 1965.
After he served as staff psychiatrist in charge of a research project on chronic mental illness at the Brentwood VA Hospital, his work culminated in the 1965 book, “Reality Therapy,” written by William Glasser. The book, offering a new approach to psychiatric treatment, was dedicated to Dr. Harrington. He counted many noted writers and entertainers among his patients, many of whom dedicated works to him. The playwright George Furth dedicated his Broadway play, “Company,” to Dr. Harrington, who was an avid sailor and continued this activity until his death.

Harrington was a big rugged looking guy who walked with a limp from a femur fracture incurred in an auto accident soon after he finished his residency at Menninger Clinic. He told me his father had been a minister who became a lay psychoanalyst and spent time in Vienna with Sigmund Freud. In fact, he told me that he had sat on Freud’s knee as a child. From the time he was 17 he wanted to be an analyst. His father was at Menninger hence his MD from U of Kansas. After the war, he began his residency at Menninger and found that analysis had little or nothing to offer psychotic patients. He told me that every summer, the staff psychiatrists would leave the state hospital on vacation, leaving the medical students to take over. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he was getting nowhere with psychotics using analysis. He was a funny guy with a great sense of humor and an ability to mimic.

He became a clinical professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and took over a ward at the Sawtelle VA hospital sometime before 1962 when I met him. He told me that staff at the VA were very skeptical of his new ideas on therapy so, early in his tenure, they lined up a “hard case” for him to demonstrate this new “talk therapy. ” The new drugs had made things much easier to deal with schizophrenics and he wanted to go beyond with some sort of behavioral therapy. He said the patient was a typical schizophrenic little guy. Harrington asked him how things were and the patient responded with a long stream of typical crazy talk. Harrington listened to all this, then responded that something very similar had happened to him. He then repeated almost verbatim the same stream of crazy talk the patient had related. Half way through, the patient he said began to laugh. He was no longer psychotic, if he had ever been so. He liked having a bed and three square meals a day. He had memorized enough crazy talk to keep everyone convinced that he belonged there. Harrington cautioned me that anybody who wanted to live in a nut house was not normal. Still, the guy was just not that psychotic. He convinced the ward staff that there was something to his ideas. After that, everybody on the staff was part of the treatment team. Even the guy who ran the floor polisher was invited to the Wednesday staff meeting.

What Harrington did was to set up a program of rules that taught these psychotic patients that we knew they were crazy and we were not about to throw them out into a world that scared them so badly. We also, me especially, talked to them and focused on the part that was not crazy. It could be exhausting to do so but patients would respond. One of them told me as I was leaving at at the end of the summer to go back to school that talking to me allowed more of his mind to come out of the psychosis. Of course, he didn’t put it that way but that is what it sounded like to me. It was an intense summer and George Harrington was someone I will never forget.

Most of my job was to do annual physicals on these man, many of whom had not been examined in years. It was an interesting experience to do prostate exams on these psychotic men. It turned out to be no big deal as they all appreciated someone looking after them. I even found a prostate cancer that summer. Psychiatry was still in the grip of analysis then and the residents from UCLA did not want to touch patients.

After returning to medical school, I met some academic psychiatrists and lost interest in the specialty. Harrington was almost unique although Glasser’s book, which explains much of Harrington’s methods, had a wide popularity and is still in print.

What is going on with China?

May 12th, 2020

China was admitted into the World Trade Organization in 2001 with the understanding that they would participate in free trade and to international norms.

Until the 1970s, China’s economy was managed by the communist government and was kept closed from other economies. Together with political reforms, China in the early 1980s began to open its economy and signed a number of regional trade agreements. China gained observer status with GATT and from 1986, began working towards joining that organization. China aimed to be included as a WTO founding member (which would validate it as a world economic power) but this attempt was thwarted because the United States, European countries, and Japan requested that China first reform various tariff policies, including tariff reductions, open markets and industrial policies.

That has not happened. China has followed a mercantilist trade policy, stealing intellectual property, requiring companies selling to the Chinese to share ownership wioth often corrupt entities owned by the Peoples Liberation Army and relative of regime principals.

Mercantilism is a policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. It promotes imperialism, tariffs and subsidies on traded goods to achieve that goal. These policies aim to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus. Mercantilism includes an economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies frequently led to war and also motivated colonial expansion.[1] Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time.

America has been largely passive in tolerating this behavior until Donald Trump became president. Some of this passivity may reflect Chinese influence with US politicians.

While it may seem politics as usual in Washington today, some are alarmed.

“Nobody in the 1980s would have represented the Russian government. And now you find so many lobbying for the Chinese government,” said Frank Wolf, a retired U.S. representative from Virginia who long served as the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. “I served in Congress for 34 years. I find it shocking.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Flynn Case Collapses.

May 7th, 2020

Today, the Department of Justice (so- called) dropped its prosecution of General Michael Flynn. This followed a ferocious defense by Sidney Powell, an attorney and author of the excellent book, “Licensed to Lie” which explained the federal misbehavior in the Enron cases, one of which resulted in a unanimous decision by the US Supreme Court that reversed the conviction of Arthur Anderson Accounting Corporation in a miscarriage of justice by Andrew Weissmann who should be disbarred for the Mueller investigation which he ran with Mueller as a senile figurehead.

Why was Flynn prosecuted ?

Here is an explanation.

The only other Republican candidate to repudiate the “Bush Freedom Agenda” was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. That is why the 2016 Republican primary became a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. The whole of the American Establishment had signed on to a utopian crusade to impose the liberal world order on the Muslim world. After nine years of frustration in Iraq, it saw in the so-called “Arab Spring” demonstrations of 2011 a second chance to bring its agenda to fruition. The result of this was the near-collapse of Egypt and an eight-year civil war in Syria that killed half a million people and displaced 10 million refugees.

Flynn called attention to this massive intelligence failure and had to be destroyed. It’s a shame that Cruz did not endorse Trump at the end on become part of a unity campaign.

I have previously posted my opinion on the Flynn matter, which does not differ from David Goldman except in detail.

After Flynn was driven out of his post at DIA, things got even more threatening to the intelligence officials, as he became a prime advisor to candidate Trump and, early in the campaign, other Republicans. After the 2016 elections, the IC officials went all-out to keep him out of the White House, sometimes resorting to spreading ridiculous stories. President Obama warned Trump not to appoint Flynn as national security advisor, and Susan Rice actually warned the president-elect that Flynn might be in violation of the Logan Act, for which nobody has ever been prosecuted, and hence blackmailable by the Russians. Meanwhile, the Bureau had opened a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn’s activities. His digital communications were monitored, “unmasked” at the request of Obama officials, and leaked to friendly journalists.

Goldman’s version is a little different.

As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.

The Syrian debacle brought Russia into Syria in 2015; the American-backed jihad had turned into a Petri dish for Russian Muslims from the Caucasus, as well as Chinese Uighurs and a motley assortment of foreign militants. Russia had interests of opportunity, for example, a warm-water refueling station for its Mediterranean fleet, but the risk of blowback from the Syrian civil war was the most urgent motive for President Vladimir Putin’s intervention.

That is the background to the mutiny in the US Intelligence Community against the elected commander-in-chief. America’s noble – or perhaps narcissistic – intentions did more damage than Trump’s indifference.

In retrospect, I think I agree even more with Goldman on this. I supported the Iraq War at first but it was botched beyond redemption.

This is another post I made on the same topic last February.

CIA must be disestablished. Its functions should be returned to the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury. FBI must be restricted to law enforcement. At home, the Agencies are partisan institutions illegitimately focused on setting national policy. Abroad, Agencies untied to specific operational concerns are inherently dangerous and low-value.
Intelligence must return to its natural place as servant, not master, of government. Congress should amend the 1947 National Security Act. The President should broaden intelligence perspectives, including briefs from State, Defense, and Treasury, and abolish CIA’s “covert action.” State should be made responsible for political influence and the armed services for military and paramilitary affairs.

This is an obvious fact. Our intelligence capability has been destroyed in China and Iran by CIA incompetence in its secure communication systems.

The Corona Virus Timeline.

April 1st, 2020

It is now becoming a theme on the left that Trump was not quick enough to recognize the coming epidemic.

For that reason, I think it valuable to keep a record of the time line.

Here is the January 12, 2020 WHO report on the virus epidemic in China.

The evidence is highly suggestive that the outbreak is associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan. The market was closed on 1 January 2020. At this stage, there is no infection among healthcare workers, and no clear evidence of human to human transmission. The Chinese authorities continue their work of intensive surveillance and follow up measures, as well as further epidemiological investigations.

Here is the January 30, 2020 report by WHO on the epidemic in China.

The Committee believes that it is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk. It is important to note that as the situation continues to evolve, so will the strategic goals and measures to prevent and reduce spread of the infection. The Committee agreed that the outbreak now meets the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and proposed the following advice to be issued as Temporary Recommendations.

The Committee emphasized that the declaration of a PHEIC should be seen in the spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the frontlines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.

Trump stopped incoming flights from China on January 31, 2020.

At this point, sharply curtailing air travel to and from China is more of an emotional or political reaction, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“The cow’s already out of the barn,” he said, ”and we’re now talking about shutting the barn door.”

A Minnesota epidemiologist’s opinion.

Nancy Pelosi tours Chinatown on February 24, 2020.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a point of taking a walk through San Francisco’s Chinatown on Monday to show that it is safe, after some merchants have seen a 50% drop in business as some fear they could be exposed to the coronavirus.

As her visit began, a large portion of Chinatown had lost power. That didn’t deter the Speaker from walking along Ross Alley and Grant Avenue.

“I’m here,” she said. “We feel safe and sound with so many of us coming here. It’s not only to say it’s safe but to say thank you for being Chinatown.”

On March 16, 2020, Mayor de Blasio was still enouraging people to attend crowded events.

For most of last week, as Mayor Bill de Blasio continued to urge New Yorkers to mostly go about their daily lives — sending their children to school, frequenting the city’s businesses — some of his top aides were furiously trying to change the mayor’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak.

There had been arguments and shouting matches between the mayor and some of his advisers; some top health officials had even threatened to resign if he refused to accept the need to close schools and businesses, according to several people familiar with the internal discussions.

So much for the urgency in dealing with the epidemic.

It is time to start the economy again.

March 21st, 2020

UPDATE: Here is a pretty good discussion of the economy right now.

I have previously described the COVID 19 virus, which is also referred to as Wuhan virus, to the annoyance of the China friendly US Media. The consequences for the US economy have been severe. The most affected states, New York, California, Illinois and Washington, have virtually shut down their population. Arizona is less affected with 78 positives cases as of today, and no deaths.

Italy and China have had the most deaths. There are a number of factors that probably affect these cases. China is notorious for air pollution and smoking, especially men smoking. There has been a dearth, so far, of listing comorbidities but age has been a major one.

One study lists mortality at age 80+ at 15%. The overall death rate in China was listed at 2.3%, which may reflect smoking and air pollution. South Korea, which has had a big spike as testing progressed much more rapidly than in the US, has a case mortality of less than 1%

South Korea has the dubious distinction of suffering the second-highest number of Covid-19 infections after China – but can also boast the lowest death ratio among countries with significant numbers of cases.

According to the WHO on March 6, the crude mortality ratio for Covid-19 – that is, the number of reported deaths divided by the number of reported cases – is between 3-4%. In Korea, as of March 9, that figure was a mere 0.7%.

AS US testing finally gets going, after the FDA and CDC delayed matters for a month, we will see a big spike in number of cases but, I am convinced, a big drop in mortality rate.

Telephone consulting services, drive-through test centers and thermal cameras – which, set up in buildings and public places to detect fever, swiftly came online. South Korea has undertaken approximately 190,000 tests thus far, according to KCDC Deputy Director General Kwon Jun-wook, and has the capacity to undertake 20,000 per day. Turnaround times are six-24 hours.

Tests are highly affordable. “The test kit is about $130, and about half is covered by insurance the other half by individual,” Kwon said. Those who test positive get the test free, “So there is no reason for suspected cases to hide their symptoms,” he said.

We should be doing the same.

At the same time, we are risking severe economic damage to the country by shutting down business activity. I believe that much of the drastic steps taken by governors, especially in New York and California, is unnecessary. High density cities like New York City and Chicago may have more reason to fear spread of the virus. Most of the country, a source of annoyance to left wing politicians, is of low population density.

Another failure of the US response is the absence of masks, which may play a role in limiting transmission in densely populated areas, as in Asia cities. There are reports that China has controlled most of the manufacturing and resists export.

China made half the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and it has expanded production nearly 12-fold since then. But it has claimed mask factory output for itself. Purchases and donations also brought China a big chunk of the world’s supply from elsewhere.

Now, worries about mask supplies are rising. As the virus’s global spread escalates, governments around the world are restricting exports of protective gear, which experts say could worsen the pandemic.

Also, there is now evidence that treatment of the infected may not require new drugs but be available with known drugs like chloroquine and its analog, hydroxychloroquine

Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva is donating millions of doses of a malaria drug that is believed to be effective in fighting the symptoms of the coronavirus.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the six million doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate will be shipped to US hospitals started March 31. By the end of next month, 10 million will be shipped.

It is uncertain how effective the malaria treatment will be against coronavirus, but research is currently ongoing.

In fact, there is good evidence that it is effective.

The in vitro antiviral activity of chloroquine has been identified since the late 1960’s (Inglot, 1969; Miller and Lenard, 1981; Shimizu et al., 1972) and the growth of many different viruses can be inhibited in cell culture by both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, including the SARS coronavirus (Keyaerts et al., 2004). Some evidence for activity in mice has been found for a variety of viruses, including human coronavirus OC43 (Keyaerts et al., 2009), enterovirus EV-A71 (Tan et al., 2018), Zika virus (Li et al., 2017) and influenza A H5N1 (Yan et al., 2013). However, chloroquine did not prevent influenza infection in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial (Paton et al., 2011), and had no effect on dengue-infecteds patient in a randomized controlled trial in Vietnam.

I had speculated that they might be effective in Influenza but this appears to not be the case.

Clinical trials have already shown effectiveness.

According to Sun, patients treated with chloroquine demonstrated a better drop in fever, improvement of lung CT images, and required a shorter time to recover compared to parallel groups.

The percentage of patients with negative viral nucleic acid tests was also higher with the anti-malarial drug.

Chloroquine has so far showed no obvious serious adverse reactions in the more than 100 participants in the trials.

The first case report using remdesivir was dramatic.

The drug is now in clinical trial but the chloroquine evidence reduces the urgency of the study.

What do we do now ?

My wife and I are at high risk but it is easy for us to self isolate. The mortality rate for those under age 50 is about equal to that of influenza. For those between 50 and 70, only those with pre-existing morbidities have a serious risk.

It is time to reopen the economy certainly by next week. The damage done by unemployment and bankruptcy will far exceed that of the disease.

The corona virus epidemic.

March 11th, 2020

A new virus emerged in Wuhan, a city in China known for a bioweapons lab and a “live market” where people buy and eat bars and other wild animals. As it happens, there is a family of viruses, which include the SARS virus, also called Severe acute respiratory syndrome.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a total of 8,098 people worldwide became sick with SARS during the 2003 outbreak. Of these, 774 died. In the United States, only eight people had laboratory evidence of SARS-CoV infection. All of these people had traveled to other parts of the world where SARS was spreading. SARS did not spread more widely in the community in the United States.

This occurred in 2003 and was limited to Asia with a few travelers.

Another similar virus was called MERS virus or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is viral respiratory illness that is new to humans. It was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and has since spread to several other countries, including the United States. Most people infected with MERS-CoV developed severe respiratory illness, including fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Many of them have died.

Both of these viruses had high mortality rates for those affected. SARS had a mortality of 774 of 8,098 people worldwide or 9.6%.

MERS mortality was higher at about 33%. It is limited to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.

The new virus is related and seems much more infectious, similar to influenza, but has a lower mortality rate

SARS-CoV-2 has close genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, from which it likely originated.[10][11][12] An intermediate reservoir such as a pangolin is also thought to be involved in its introduction to humans.[13][14] From a taxonomic perspective SARS-CoV-2 is classified as a strain of the species severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (SARSr-CoV).[1] To avoid confusion with the disease SARS, the WHO sometimes refers to the virus as “the virus responsible for COVID-19” in public health communications.[15]

There is speculation that the disease is caused by a virus that might have escaped from the Wuhan bioweapons lab, either in a bat that was the subject of experiments or via another vector, perhaps an infected employee. Bat viruses have been of great interest because, while they cause disease in humans, they appear not to harm bats.

Bats that are naturally infected or experimentally infected do not demonstrate clinical signs of disease. These observations have allowed researchers to speculate that bats are the likely reservoirs or ancestral hosts for several CoVs. In this review, we follow the CoV outbreaks that are speculated to have originated in bats. We review studies that have allowed researchers to identify unique adaptation in bats that may allow them to harbor CoVs without severe disease. We speculate about future studies that are critical to identify how bats can harbor multiple strains of CoVs and factors that enable these viruses to “jump” from bats to other mammals

Possibly research into this phenomenon led to the outbreak.

The virus is an RNA virus, and is an enveloped, non-segmented positive-sense RNA viruses.

Coronavirus virions are spherical with diameters of approximately 125 nm as depicted in recent studies by cryo-electron tomography and cryo-electron microscopy [2,3]. The most prominent feature of coronaviruses is the club-shape spike projections emanating from the surface of the virion. These spikes are a defining feature of the virion and give them the appearance of a solar corona, prompting the name, coronaviruses. Within the envelope of the virion is the nucleocapsid. Coronaviruses have helically symmetrical nucleocapsids, which is uncommon among positive-sense RNA viruses, but far more common for negative-sense RNA viruses.

The receptor at cell level seems to be the ACE2, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2; mCEACAM, murine carcinoembryonic antigen-related adhesion molecule.

Treatment with Remdesivir, a Nucleotide analog, has been effective in the first case report.

at a period consistent with the development of radiographic pneumonia in this patient, clinicians pursued compassionate use of an investigational antiviral therapy. Treatment with intravenous remdesivir (a novel nucleotide analogue prodrug in development10,11) was initiated on the evening of day 7, and no adverse events were observed in association with the infusion. Vancomycin was discontinued on the evening of day 7, and cefepime was discontinued on the following day, after serial negative procalcitonin levels and negative nasal PCR testing for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

On hospital day 8 (illness day 12), the patient’s clinical condition improved. Supplemental oxygen was discontinued, and his oxygen saturation values improved to 94 to 96% while he was breathing ambient air. The previous bilateral lower-lobe rales were no longer present.

Chloroquine has also been reported to be effective in treated the pneumonia.

Early data from clinical trials being performed in China has revealed that chloroquine phosphate could help treat the new coronavirus disease, Covid-19.

China National Center for Biotechnology Development deputy head Sun Yanrong said that chloroquine, an anti-malarial medication, was selected after several screening rounds of thousands of existing drugs.

Xinhua reported that the drug is undergoing clinical trials in more than ten hospitals in Beijing, Guangdong province, and Hunan province.

Chloroquine data from Covid-19 trials
Data from the drug’s studies showed ‘certain curative effect’ with ‘fairly good efficacy’.

According to Sun, patients treated with chloroquine demonstrated a better drop in fever, improvement of lung CT images, and required a shorter time to recover compared to parallel groups.

The percentage of patients with negative viral nucleic acid tests was also higher with the anti-malarial drug.

Chloroquine has so far showed no obvious serious adverse reactions in the more than 100 participants in the trials.